Sun, 12 Feb 2006

Videogaming Keeps the Brain From Aging

A bit of anecdotal evidence here: my mom, who's 82 and has a variety of health issues, is also remarkably mentally sharp. She plays video games incessantly: mostly tile games (Mah-Jong) but also Tetris type games, mini-golf games and even a shooter or two. Not to mention more types of Solitaire than I knew existed. And I've thought for a long time that this has helped her ward off the failings of senility. But there is a downside... she doesn't relate too well to the folks who live around her, many of whom consider computers to be the tool of the Devil and most of whom have never touched a keyboard. And many of them, despite being considerable;y younger than mom in many instances, are quite senile.

A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tasks. A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable.

(link) [Slashdot]

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